The world’s biggest banks have been ordered to raise almost £800 billion as regulators try to prevent taxpayers having to bail out failed lenders.
Under rules published yesterday by the Swiss-based Financial Stability Board, the most systemically important banks, including British lenders such as Barclays and HSBC, will have to sell the new debt by 2022.
Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England and chairman of the FSB, said that the new capital standard was “robust” and would reduce the risk of public money being placed at risk by the failure of a large financial group.
Under capital requirements set out by the FSB, within little more than three years banks will have had to have sold loss-absorbing debt to private investors equivalent